Human rights sat decidedly at the core of Soviet Union¨CUnited States relations during the Cold War. International awareness, support for dissidents, and tangible accountability measures made human rights a powerful tool in the US arsenal to combat Communist influence. Yet today Washington is not applying the same clarity to the actions of the Chinese Communist Party. Whether it is the Uyghurs or any other group from the laundry list of oppressed minorities, the CCP has made it a policy to subjugate, kill, silence, or ¡°reeducate¡± anyone who does not center their beliefs around those of the party. Senior Fellow Olivia Enos joins the show this week to paint a scary picture of just how widespread CCP repression is, and how the US can step up to the plate to hold the Communist regime to account for its human rights violations.
China Insider is a weekly podcast project from 91ÆÞÓÑ Institute's China Center, hosted by Miles Yu, who provides weekly news that mainstream American outlets often miss, as well as in-depth commentary and analysis on the China challenge and the free world¡¯s future.
Event Transcript
This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.
Miles Yu:
Welcome to China Insider, a podcast from the 91ÆÞÓÑ Institute's China Center. I'm Miles Yu, senior fellow and director of the China Center. In this week's segment of China Insider Interviews, I'm thrilled to welcome the newest member to China team here at the 91ÆÞÓÑ Institute, Olivia Enos, and to discuss her recent project on human rights, particularly related to the Uyghurs suffering in Xinjiang province and many, many more salient issues. Olivia specializes in human rights and national security challenges in Asia. Her work focuses on China, North Korea, Hong Kong, Burma, Cambodia, and more. She covers issues including democracy, governance, religious freedom, and refugees. So welcome to China Insider and insider interview, Olivia.
Olivia Enos:
Well, thank you so much, Miles for having me on. It's really, really exciting to be here.
Miles Yu:
Very, very good. So let me just go right to it. Human rights is such a hallmark of global politics for years and years, even for decades in the US-China relationship. We don't talk about it in a sort of a primary place. We usually use that I will not say as a window dressing, but particularly the Chinese government obviously does not want to talk about it, therefore, US government normally don't want to talk about it. Why is human rights so important in the bilateral relationship between China and the United States?
Olivia Enos:
I think this is a really core and central question. I think as you mentioned, Miles, unfortunately for US foreign policy and US policy toward China, human rights issues have often been viewed as secondary, maybe even tangential to a lot of the security and strategy conversations that we're having. And I think this is a huge mistake because the reality is that the Chinese Communist Party does not view repression, does not view human rights violations as tangential. They view it as very, very central. There's a fabulous book written by Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell called China's Search for Security. It's a fabulous book. Everyone should read it if they're interested in China. But in that book, Nathan and Scobell argue that China has a couple of core foreign policy priorities. One is to maintain sovereignty and the second is to safeguard internal stability or security. And the CCP has defined what the US traditionally thinks of as human rights issues.
So, like unrest in Hong Kong or persecution of Uyghurs and Tibetans or any sort of religious minority or overall persecution of the Chinese people as core to its foreign policy goals. They see it as central to being able to maintain the party¡¯s preeminence, the party's power. And so they continue to engage in rights violation after rights violation. And so when the US government decides to say, eh, we'll get to human rights issues after we've dealt with other security or economic challenges, I think we're leaving a lot of really important ground off the table when we could be using this as an essential component of broader overarching US strategy towards China. And I know we're going to be talking about that a lot today in the Uyghur context, but I'm excited to tease out those ideas more.
Miles Yu:
Fantastic. You said it better than anybody I know. Human rights is the hallmark of the US-China interactions, yet we give up the leverage we're good at. China doesn't have it because the entire regime rests on suppression of based human rights of Chinese people. You look at how Chinese government operates, you don't mention about foreign policy, sovereignty, all the other issues. But domestically, every single policy issue from the Chinese Communist Party is aiming at how to keep the population under control, how to deprive their basic human rights, how to observe, bamboozle them to believe in the Chinese propaganda indoctrination. That's why they have this worst, most advanced surveillance system, the most comprehensive and most efficient censorship system. So human rights violation to the CCP is what oxygen to a normal human being.
That's why if you don't talk about this and then you give up your leverage now in the United States Department you have a huge bureau called the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. We give up our right opportunity to interact with the Chinese people to interact with the Chinese dissident back almost 40 years ago. This is the beginning of the Clinton administration or even beyond. Sovereignty has to be popular sovereignty. If people does not consent to your representation of them, therefore you don't have a sovereignty. And that's what democracy is all about. Democracy is being literally in Chinese minzhu (ÃñÖ÷). It means that is literally translated as people being their master.
Olivia Enos:
Yeah, I think there's also a failure in US government at times to recognize just how fundamentally different our two systems are. Like you're talking about representative democracy or republic, that where every single person in the US enjoys basic fundamental human rights. In a communist setting like China, the rights of an individual are viewed as entirely subservient to the government and their ability to rule with the iron fist. And I think one of the things that has been so shocking to me, both in my work that I've done on China, but also on North Korea, is that you see authoritarian governments and that's what they are. We have to label them as they are authoritarian governments saying all of the things that you as a human hold really dear, like close interpersonal trust in family relationships, in neighbor relationships, in friendships generally, those should be undermined for the purposes of replacing trust that you would have on a people to people level and putting in place a government that everything that you can count on, everything that matters to you can only be provided through the government. And it creates this really pernicious cycle where yes, of course it props up regimes like the Kim regime in North Korea or Xi in China as the case may be, but it makes it so that human life is in some ways less worth living because you're always relying on a government that does not have your best interest, but has the interest of the party at the core. And that results in a lot of human rights violation. It doesn't matter whether you're looking in the Soviet context or the North Korean context or the Chinese context. It has always had the same outcomes. And that's why it's so shocking to me that history keeps repeating itself or that even folks here in the US are like, well, what about communism? Maybe we should consider this utopian mindset. When we have both historical and modern failures that so vividly represent that the system doesn't work
Miles Yu:
All totalitarian dictatorships abuse the rights of the people in the name of the people. That's why the most repressive regimes like China, Soviet Union, they all have the people in there, people's Republic of China, people's Republic of Mongolia, people's Republic of Hungary, people's Republic of Romania, it's all in the name of people. Now, Olivia, we're discussing the fundamental issue of human rights in bilateral relationship between China and the United States in downtown Washington DC We are several blocks away from the White House.
The bilateral relationship has always been the domain by professional diplomats, our foreign policy experts. And that's where the problem is because we view US-China relationship profoundly and preponderantly only from the point of view of a foreign policy. Now foreign policy is a good thing, but foreign policy cares about smooth relationship. Foreign policy talks about how to manage the relationship. You hear the phrase all the time, how to manage the relationship, how to control the competition. But that's precisely the problem because human rights usually is lacking because there's a lack of human rights preeminence in US China relationship. So, US government often faces a lot of criticism by the domestic audience in the United States, and here's my pet peeve about this. US government routinely rolls out human rights reports condemning China for its human rights violations, but often to shut up the domestic criticism, not necessarily to improve the bilateral relationship. And that's where I found the problem is because they go to China, perfunctory, condemn China, and then come back and say, Hey, let's continue business as usual.
Olivia Enos:
Yeah. Yeah. I think there needs to be a real commitment and I think that there's a role for the American people to play in holding those whom may have elected to account, right? Because China policy is made both by Congress and the executive branch. And so I think there's a real need for the American people also to be better educated on the extent of the rights violations that are occurring. I mean, I myself grew up in the Midwest. I grew up in suburban, like a suburb of Chicago. And when I go back and visit, a lot of times friends of mine who are very well educated have never even heard about the Uyghur genocide that's ongoing much less like what's happening to Tibetans or Falun Gong or Christians or Catholics or others in China. And I think that there's a need for better education for the purposes of holding folks in Washington to account because the commitments to addressing the China issue are very fair weather. It depends on the day and where the wind is blowing and all of these things. And the reality is that the CCP poses arguably the most significant national security threat to the United States, and it poses that threat on every single level on security, on economics, and of course on human rights.
Miles Yu:
Yeah. Well, before we go to the specifics about your work in Uyghurs and Tibet, Tibetans, let me ask you a more general question. Why is that that during the Cold War we were so harsh on the Soviet Union, we placed human rights, particularly since the 1970s at the center of our dealing with the Soviet Union, mostly due to the Helsinki Accords. We inserted in the Helsinki accord with the Soviets, the issue of human rights. Ever since that United States has been consistently supporting the Soviet dissidents, whenever Aksyonovs, Maksinovs are in trouble, our president, our state department, our media launched the barrage of attacks on the Soviet system for violation of human rights that I think really contributed tremendously to the collapse, that evil empire that Ronald Reagan so rightly labeled.
Why is that on China, we don't talk about human rights as much. We don't always believe due to the inference of people like Henry Kissinger that believe the Chinese people, particularly Chinese government, is burdened by 5,000 years of history, China, all China wanted is rejuvenation of the nation. So we should be sympathetic to the Chinese leader for their arduous task of standing up as the superpower in the world. Why is that this sharp contrast, we don't look at the Chinese systemic egregious violation of human rights on a massive scale, unprecedented human history as what it is. It's a communist regime whose systemic repression of human rights is literally that systemic.
Olivia Enos:
Yeah, well, I guess it's been said before that people are politics and Ronald Reagan was a bold leader and he had a clear vision for how he wanted to counter this Soviet Union. And of course it was a very multifaceted strategy that engaged in a lot of different elements of security and economic and human rights related issues. But Ronald Reagan recognized that America was this shining city on a hill and that freedom was something that was precious that was worth preserving in our own domestic context, but also worth sharing with people who yearn for freedom all across the globe. And I think he made this a centerpiece of US efforts. And if we want to get into the nitty gritties, I mean the information operations, for example, that were done during the Soviet Union to undermine the Soviet leadership were just incredible. And they gave people access to the information that they needed to be able to make decisions about how and in what ways they wanted to counter the Soviet Union at that time.
I think it's incredible to see the ways in which people saw America standing up for freedom and were inspired by that. I even remember in high school I traveled to Romania with my church and the legacy that Ceausescu had left was immense, but the legacy of faithful Catholics and Christians who had led the counterinsurgency against Ceausescu, this horrible communist leader even there in the Soviet bloc countries, it was just so palpable. It was really clear and really evident. And so I think you need bold leadership. And to be honest, Biden has not been that at all. The Biden administration has in the ways that they have communicated about China not been clear that the CCP is an adversary. They have said, oh, it's an adversary and a partner, which is really quite odd to phrase it in that way. And so, I think that American people even are left with is China sort of a friend and also sort of an enemy.
And so, I think it's led to a stagnant policymaking that has often been working at odds. There have been competing visions, and I know we'll discuss this in the Uyghur context, but just very briefly, the Biden administration's commitment to climate, for example, has made them less committed to enforcing US policy to counter Uyghur forced labor or to tackle Uyghur human rights challenges in general, or the desire to make a profit in China has made them less outspoken when it came to Hong Kong's just complete stepping away from any sort of democratic freedoms. And so it's created what some might say is a schizophrenic policy where on one hand they're like, we have to counter China, but then on the other hand, we're seeking cooperation and collaboration in ways that undermine all of those other efforts. And you did not have that with Reagan. So I think there's a real need for bold leadership, yes, at the executive level.
But to be honest, even if you can't have hope at the executive level like in the president to deliver what you want, we've got to see so much more from Congress. And I just think that Congress was very active in the pandemic era, but a lot of the attention and a lot of the unity around the China issue that existed immediately in the aftermath of the pandemic or right around the pandemic that's starting to wane. I feel like you and I have a really big responsibility to educate members and to educate folks generally about the threat that the CCP is posing on all levels
Miles Yu:
In addition to the unity that you mentioned. I think there's also a fundamental different understanding the China threat. Pretty much everybody realized China is a big threat to the United States. That's bipartisan, right? You come from heritage where you worked for many years and I myself served in the previous administration and Trump administration, now we're living in the Biden era. The contrasts couldn't be clearer to me that is in the previous administration, we had a very different understanding of strategic intent of the Chinese Communist Party. We completely changed our view on the nature of the Chinese Communist Party. That is, it's ideological, it's aim is to undermine the democracy and freedom driven international order to replace it with the Chinese Communist Party led order. Now, the Biden demonstration is different. Biden administration, similarly, agreeing with us that China's big threat, but they view this issue China threat purely from the transactional point of view.
There's an issue of South China Sea, there's an issue of fentanyl, there's an issue of border illegal crossing. There is a whole bunch of and there¡¯s China siding with Russia and it is just like to solve your illness by taking Tylenol. It's not really complete solution with all due respect to Tylenol. This is very different from the Cold War era in a Cold War era. You have a bipartisan ideological understanding of the Soviet system. So you mentioned about Ronald Reagan was staunch freedom loving American president leader with courage. Jimmy Cutter's foreign policy foundation is called human rights, but his reaction to Soviet aggression violation human rights is very feeble and anemic. When Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, all he could do was boycott the Moscow Summer Olympics of 1980. But you do have some people, national leaders, bipartisan, who have complete similar understanding of communism, anti-communism was not a dirty word in the Cold War. You have Democrats Scoot Jackson, JFK, Sam Nunn, Fulbright, those guys. And also, in the house you have Steven Solarz who understood the nature of communism and they have no problem. Those are anti-communist Democrats. And of course you have on the Republican side many more Jesse Helms, Barry Goldwater, all those guys were Reagan as well. Nowadays, democrats really refuse to recognize it, it's hard for them to call Chinese Communist party communist.
So, they are essentially in their mind a nationalist. So this is a problem, this is a problem we are having right now. So I think on that ground, we do not have a national consensus overall. We do have consensus on the threat posed by China how to deal with it. You can see from this election; I still don't know what Tim Walz stands on China. This is a problem. We need transparency. Our national leader should give American people a clear statement on their stand on Chinese communism. So by the way, we digress. So there's a Soviet Union you mentioned about of course the interest of social groups. China and Soviet Union differed in a fundamental way that Soviet Union was completely caught off from the free trading system of the globe. China is not, China is embraced as a member. They enjoy full membership of international trading system. So that's probably, that's why we have interest from Wall Street, from other, that's probably as a, let me just move away a little bit to the issue of a Uyghur issue and the plight and suffering of Tibetan and Uyghurs. Can you describe a little bit more about the scale? Why is that evokes so much emotional response from United States? You are the leading scholar on this issue.
Olivia Enos:
Oh, well I don't know about that. There's so many incredible people working in the field, but the CCP today is carrying out what now know to be ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity against the Uyghur people. There's at least 1.8 million Uyghurs that are currently held. That number is likely conservative. Some people say as many as 3 million held in political reeducation facilities there. You mentioned earlier in the podcast about how the CCP just has an incredible surveillance tech system that surveillance tech aided and abetted in the expediency of what is this ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity. It just enabled the CCP to round up Uyghurs at such a vast, fast paced level. And I think we're all shocked by that. The CCP is also running what some including incredible China scholar Adrian Zenz at the Victims of Communism Memorial Museum has said is the largest state-sponsored program of forced labor in the world.
So, there's an estimated 3 million Uyghurs that are currently subject to forced labor. And I think when you look at the methods and the means that the CCP has used to exploit the Uyghur people, it really typifies the absolute worst elements of collectivization, which is a key feature of communism throughout history. And so I think everyone has been absolutely shocked because the CCP hasn't just put folks in the political reeducation camps hasn't just engaged in forced labor. They've also sought to erase and eliminate the next generation of Uighurs. And I know when the Trump administration made their atrocity determination on the last day of the administration, for example, one of the pieces of evidence that they found most convincing was also some research from Adrian Zenz that had found Chinese Communist Party documents that stated explicitly that they had a goal of forcibly sterilizing over 80% of Uyghur women of childbearing age in certain parts of Xinjiang.
So, if you forcibly sterilize 80% of Uyghur women of childbearing age, you have just erased the next generation of people and you've done it silently. So again, expedient if you will, and what a terrible way to say that. But that's what's happening. And so, the Uyghur people, I think it bears hallmarks of previous atrocities that we thought were relegated to the history books like the Holocaust, but it's taken on some different forms. And so I think that's why it receives the level of attention that it does, but honestly, the level of attention is not enough.
Miles Yu:
That's right. You mentioned about the Trump administration designation of the Chinese atrocities in Xinjiang as genocide. I'm very familiar with that process because I was there. So in the last days of Trump administration, secretary State, Mike Pompeo, who is by the way a tremendous American leader with courage, tremendous courage. And he basically ask the bureaus, the experts, give me the facts and we give him the facts. And he said, why you still not considered as genocide? Because there are five categories criteria by the United Nations, each one of them if violated would be qualified as genocide,
Olivia Enos:
Right? You don't have to violate all five, just one.
Miles Yu:
China probably would violate list of four and a half. You mentioned about the forced sterilization. That is genocidal. You're talking about the whole population get rid of their posterity.
Olivia Enos:
And the crux of genocide and the hardest element to prove is intent to destroy in whole in part a people group on the basis of their ethnicity, race, religion, et cetera. And it's so clear from that evidence.
Miles Yu:
I remember Secretary Pompeo showed me several inches thick of legal opinions from our lawyers who are splitting hairs. So splitting hairs about the atrocity against humanities versus genocide. They said on the cautious side, we probably should not go for genocide. Secretary Pompeo said on the cautious side, we should not do anything. So you cannot explain the United States that beacon of freedom and democracy, the hope of tens of hundreds of millions of people in the world who come here to seek freedom, to breathe freely and to say nothing. When you have over 1 million at the time, that's the figure Uyghurs locked up in concentration by the regime that we're still splitting hairs over. So that's basically is very, very, very important to, by the way, since that designation, there has been no evidence to doubt the validity of designation by anybody. So that's why you have to act on courage. You have to act on evidence, and you have to act most importantly on conscience.
Olivia Enos:
Yeah, absolutely. And so I advocated in the private sector, in the nonprofit space, as you mentioned, I was at Heritage at the time. I wrote a paper calling on the administration to issue an atrocity determination and I had the opportunity to brief Secretary Pompeo on this issue and it was a real honor to be able to go and do that. But one of the main reasons that I was so excited about an atrocity determination is people always ask me, well, what is properly labeling something? What does that mean for anyone? And it means so much. There is power in saying exactly something what is, and this is clear as clear can be that it was both genocide and crimes against humanity. But beyond that, an atrocity determination is so powerful because it sparks additional follow on action. And what you got after the atrocity determination was Congress saying, okay, we have to do something about this. And then you had the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which came along in relatively short order after. And I really do believe that the atrocity determination helped to light a fire under Congress's belly. And that's why our system is so cool that you have the executive branch, you have the legislative branch, they communicate with each other, but then they make decisions separately. And it's amazing how they can kind of feed off of each other to create meaningful change and help people at the end of the day.
Miles Yu:
You mentioned about technical difficulty or prove somebody's intent, that's actually very, very philosophical and even epistemological because how do you prove somebody's intent? So therefore you must have some kind of ideological grounding to understand what really animates system like Chinese CCP regime to operate. Right? When a foreign policy designation is made, our leaders often listen to the professional lawyers and that's I think is a mistake. You also have to listen to expert from outside of bureaucracy. So that's why we Secretary Pompeo, listen to voices such as the voices from Mary Kissel, ambassador Kelly Curry and you and the Uyghurs themselves.
Olivia Enos:
And so many, yeah, many survivors.
Miles Yu:
I have helped Secretary Pompeo meet with so many groups from the captive nations, Tibetan, FalunGong followers, Christians and Buddhists, you name it. I mean no secular state has met so many dissidents. And most importantly of course you mentioned the Chinese Communist regime is not just about targeting minorities and disadvantaged groups. The regime aim at they capture all. So that's why China's atrocities, were not just against the minorities like Uighurs and Tibetans but the entire Chinese population. So, you mentioned about the camps for Uyghurs. There are size of the camps much, much bigger for the ordinary Chinese called the Laogai (À͸Ä) system labor reform camps. We have been documented for decades, decades. So this is not just a regime that target in a small groups that's just about the whole population. Let's move on a little bit to another issue about the intent. When China concentrated its efforts suppressing Uyghurs by locking up millions of them in the camps, the US led the international coalition to condemn China's practices. Oddly enough, we didn't have any Muslim majority country to go along with us. Not even Indonesia, not even Malaysia, not even Benin, not even Suriname. Those are moderate Muslim states. I figured out this is when I was at the administration reason why, because we approach the AI methods. AI is not artificial intelligence. AI means Amnesty International because Amnesty International methods, by the way, is a tremendous human rights organization. They focus on cases when something happens and then we come to rescue, we come to condemn the urge, the dictators to release them, but doesn't explain, doesn't focus on why this case has happened in the first place, which is why do they intend to do this kind of stuff? So this is why my criticism of our approach to the Xinjiang Uyghur issue is that we focus on the suffering of the Uyghurs, the physical torture of them in the camps. But we do not focus on China's war against all organized religions. From an ideological point of view, if we say China's atrocities in Xinjiang, were about eliminating Muslim Islam as a faith. And then it would much harder for the Muslim majority country leaders to reject our appeal to help to condemn the Chinese government.
Olivia Enos:
I think unfortunately that a lot of the Muslim majority countries have been bought off by China in some way or another. I know he's a mutual friend of ours, but Michael Solic at American Foreign Policy Council has done a lot to look at how China has used the Belt and Road initiative to really coerce a lot of countries into silence. And this has included silence over human rights.
Miles Yu:
Issues in addition that many of the Muslim in majority countries conducted atrocities similar to what China's been doing.
Olivia Enos:
Right, exactly. And I think that a lot of the countries are worried about the US coming and saying, Hey, you got to clean up your own act as well. So, I think there's a bit of self-interest, a lot of self-interest involved, which I guess it always is in statecraft. But that concerns me a lot. And I think that there is a need to understand the religious and the cultural and the ethnic elements of persecution. I think that's an essential element of China's ideological targeting of individuals. But I think there's also just a fundamental difference in how the CCP views people as people. They don't view people as having inherent value and worth. They view people as valuable and worthwhile if they end up building up the party. If you are working in opposition to the party, whether you're religious or non-religious ethnic or non-ethnic Han Chinese or anything else, you are viewed as a threat if you are not just going along to get along with what the CCP is doing. And so that is why you have it is a vast government system that is based and predicated on the subjugation of the Chinese people and so I think there's a real need to wake up to that and to not just half-heartedly commit to countering the human rights violations that the CCP is perpetrating, but to recognize that they're an essential element of the CCP¡¯s maintenance of power and that a failure to target a key node of the CCPs¡¯ elements of power is leaving the US on its back foot strategically.
Miles Yu:
Okay, great. So time passes very quickly, but I do have a very good question for you and I'm dying to hear the answer. You are the world expert on this now. Congress passed a Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and has been there for several years, and US government has taken some actions mostly in the form of sanctions and putting many companies culpable on the entity list. I just read a fantastic article by you a report, as a matter of fact, it's called Strengthening Implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. And you touched on some of the salient issues in the current discourse on Uyghur forced labor. Could you illuminate a little bit more on what you're finding?
Olivia Enos:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, when you have forced labor on the scale that you have it on, 3 million estimated people who are subjected to forced labor, the US government really had no choice but to act. And the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act has many components, but the one that's most well-known is the rebuttable presumption. So now when goods that are suspected of being produced with Uyghur forced labor, whether that's originating in China or elsewhere when they come to our borders, it is automatically assumed that they were produced with forced labor and therefore banned entry into the United States. It's an incredibly powerful tool and a tool that I would say we're still in the implementation phase, so we're not seeing the full depth and breadth of what I think this tool really can do. The report was written at the two year or almost three-year mark of UFLPA implementation, and it was intended to take stock of what's worked and what hasn't worked so far. And I would say that there are a couple of areas where UFLPA could really be strengthened. One is that under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, if an importer has a good that stopped at the border and investigated by Customs and Border Patrol, the primary implementing, they have the ability to actually re-export that good before it's ever determined whether it was produced with Uyghur forced labor. I don't believe any company should be able to get away with potentially bringing some good that was tainted by Uyghur forced labor into the US market and simply go and profit from that in another market context. So that's something that I think really needs to be dealt with and addressed. The second is that CBP has tools at its disposal to be able to actually fine or even subject and import it to forfeiture.
Miles Yu:
Just for the benefit of the listeners, the CBP stands for
Olivia Enos:
Custom and Border Patrol? Yes. We were talking about how in DC we proliferate acronyms, so Customs and Border Patrol, but Customs and Border Patrol already has the authority to subject an importer to fines or even forfeiture for having imported goods produced with forced labor or engaging in fraud or gross fraud or negligence. And yet not a single fine has been issued or good forfeited under UFLPA. And yet we know that there are goods that have been imported that are produced with forced labor. And I would say arguably an importer should face a further penalty, not just that they can't profit off of those goods in the US market, but that they should face consequences for engaging in illegal activity. It's illegal to import goods produced with forced labor. But finally, I think we have to find a way to make UFLPA helpful to the Uyghur people because if a good is already making its way to a US market, the forced labor has already occurred. But if you were to make better use of fines and forfeiture, et cetera, you could take the proceeds from that and put it into a survivor's fund for Uyghurs. There are many Uyghurs here who are Uyghur-American, who are Uyghurs waiting for their asylum claims to be processed. That's a whole other issue I'm sure we could talk about for hours, but many of whom have family members that are detained back in Xinjiang. Imagine being able to use the funds from those violators of UFLPA and being able to take those back and pour them into the Uyghur community to be able to help them to try and get their family members out or to provide assistance after they've survived the atrocities that we've talked about being in the camps and subject to forced labor. And otherwise there's tons of other recommendations in the paper. But those three are the ones that immediately come to my mind as next steps.
Miles Yu:
Yeah, you should find out Olivia's excellent report on 91ÆÞÓÑ's website,
Miles Yu:
. Let me just say to you how powerful the concept of rebuttable presumption actually is. It's not just about Uyghur, it's about entire China. Because for decades we have been cooperating with China, engaging China under the false assumption that China is subjected to market economy. So, ethos and operational regulations. No, China is fundamentally a non-market economy. China is fundamentally a communist state. Its economy is not decided by market fluctuations. And demand and supply economy is guided and protected by a totalitarian government of China. This is one of the concept, similar concept that developed by Secretary Pompeo during the Trump administration. He said during the Cold War, Ronald Reagan told Gorbachev, the Soviet leader trust by verify. Pompeo said, no, no, no, we cannot trust China. So our operational methods toward China should be distrust but verify. We assume you cannot be trusted. It's incumbent upon you to prove otherwise. This is so important because our entire economic engagement,
Olivia Enos:
It's predicated on trust.
Miles Yu:
That's right. But
Olivia Enos:
Trust.
Miles Yu:
So, we should do the other way around. I mean, reality has proven us, right. I think what's going on in the last several years, all the talk about decoupling, all the calls, talk about China being investible, going through this, China cannot be trusted. So China in my view, is not even qualified to enjoy the benefits of international free trade system because China essentially is not free.
Olivia Enos:
Yeah, and I would say that for me it was so encouraging to see a powerful tool like a rebuttable presumption, but also other economic tools that we have at our disposal being reached for a little bit more readily. Under the Trump administration, you did see a greater use of those financial tools of engagement in the human rights context specifically. Other administrations have used it primarily in the security context, but there is so much ground to be trod, well-trod ground that has been used in the security sector that can apply in the human rights context. And it helps us to bring together our strategic efforts to counter China in a coherent way that somebody who is sitting in State Department can understand a little bit better.
Miles Yu:
Coherent, but also multilateral because you don't know how much time this Biden administration is a charge against the Trump administration that we act alone or a cowboy we¡¯re unilateralist. It is total nonsense. You don't know how much time we spend on convincing our friends of allies, the Brits, the French, the Germans, to go along with our China policy. I mean, why are we condemning China's a violation, the genocidal practice in Xinjiang, German companies, Volkswagen, they're building a plant in Xinjiang at the heart of the Uyghur population area.
Olivia Enos:
Yes, they are. And Tesla too.
Miles Yu:
Well, that's a different issue, but what I'm saying is that we place a premium on cooperation from friends and allies. We're not acting alone. And it's our friends and allies sometimes who do not want to join us. They're the unilateralist, not us. So I think Biden team is lucky because this is post covid. We led a good foundation for Biden to work on. So most importantly, our China policy. I think pretty much like we have some common understanding where to go. Well, time is come for us to say goodbye. And Olivia, so nice to have you join us.
Olivia Enos:
Thank you so much for having me on.
Miles Yu:
And you've been a wonderful addition to our China project here.
Olivia Enos:
Thank you.
Miles Yu:
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